Minister considers European judgement to give prisoners right to vote

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the United Kingdom had violated human rights by barring a prisoner from voting.

In March 2004, the ECHR ruled in Hirst vs United Kingdom that the UK government's blanket ban barring sentenced prisoners from voting was unlawful.

A spokesperson for the Justice and Home Affairs’ Ministry told MaltaToday that the Ministry had “taken cognisance of this judgement and especially the judgement Frodl v Austria (20201/04) delivered by the European Court of Human Rights on 8 April 2010. The Ministry is currently in the process drafting the required law to address the issues raised above.”

However, the Ministry spokesperson claimed that the judgement in question “did not rule that it is illegal for states that are party to the European Convention to disenfranchise prisoners and deny them the right to vote in an election.

“What the judgement ruled against was the automatic blanket ban imposed by the United Kingdom on all prisoners who receive a jail term.”

According to the Ministry, the Court found that such a ban “lacked the required proportionality in the punishment which should be handed down on a convicted offender on an individual basis according to the crime committed”.

The ECHR further commented that “the disenfranchisement of a convicted offender should be a matter that is left to the discretion of the sentencing court, and not an administrative body and that it was for the legislature to decide whether any restriction on the right to vote should be tailored to particular offences, or offences of a particular gravity,” the Justice and Home Affairs spokesperson told MaltaToday.

So the Maltese Government is likely to draft a law which would remove the automatic ban that is currently in force, and leave it to the discretion of the Law Courts whether to disenfranchise a voter or not.

Mid-Dlam għad-Dawl (MDD), the NGO which champions prisoners’ rights, was elated with the ECHR Court judgement: “We logically agree to the conclusions of the judgement,” MDD’s Nicholas Valencia told MaltaToday.

MDD believes that “the current scenario where prisoners are prohibited from voting does constitute a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

Valencia explained how it “would not like to delve into any consideration as to whether the judgement would as such open the floodgates of judicial recourses by prisoners.

“The government should acknowledge the rights of prisoners to participate in the electoral process as a matter of principle rather than as a result of specific contentious legal action brought purposely to quash the current prohibition.”